Residents clean up after Griesbach sewage flood
‘It was like a geyser,’ says one woman whose basement filled with grey water
Baby photos, costly university textbooks and cherished trading-card collections that took years to build — these are a few of many belongings lost in the sewage flooding that has wreaked havoc in an estimated 130 homes in the north Edmonton neighbourhood of Griesbach.
Water levels in the sewage tank that overflowed last weekend due to heavy rain are beginning to return to normal, said Epcor in a news release Thursday, but residents are now left to pick up the soggy pieces of their lives that were damaged beyond repair.
“It was like a geyser out of the bottom of the vents,” said Justine Toms outside her Griesbach townhouse on Thursday evening.
The greywater in her home topped out at about seven inches, but she noted it could have been a lot worse. Just a month earlier, Toms had moved about half of her basement to storage to make way for a roommate downstairs.
Nearby, Breanna Elrick’s home was flooded, not just with greywater, but with raw sewage up to just under her knee. She, her fiance and their two children moved into a hotel Saturday because the smell was “unbearable” and unsafe for her toddler.
“We thought that our washer is leaking at first,” said Elrick of the morning she discovered the flooding. Soon, she said, they realized it was more than their washer.
“We were running and grabbing whatever we could to save it before it got wet.”
Lost in the flooding were her fiance’s prized Yu-gi-oh and Pokemon card collections, as well as their living-room furniture. One residence lost irreplaceable baby pictures in raw sewage that reached three or four feet in the basement.
All the residents who spoke with Postmedia said that insurance was taking care of most, if not all, costs related to the flooding.
Toms said she feels lucky that she was physically able to clear her basement and that her supervisor was understanding enough to give her time off to deal with it.
“For the people that couldn’t physically do that or it was too contaminated to do it, they had to go through insurance to get someone to do that,” she said, adding that a neighbour who is pregnant had to wait for insurance to send help.
“It was devastating, but I didn’t lose what other people did.”